Gaga “Drags” Herself Through the VMAs

By Eddie McCaffray and Meghan Vicks

Opening: Gaga as the screen, or the white canvas

Eddie: Gaga begins as a blank canvas. Not just white, but flat and huge, filling the TV screen.

Meghan: Exactly! I had the same thought! The opening shot of Gaga’s face in what appears to be the center of a white canvas, combined with the fact that the shot is filmed in such as way that Gaga’s face/canvas takes up the entire screen, does two really interesting things. On the one hand, it associates Gaga with the white canvas (an idea Roland Betancourt has been writing about here on Gaga Stigmatafor years), a canvas upon which various manifestations of Gaga come into being (and indeed, we see these various Gagas manifest throughout the performance).

On the other hand, in that opening shot Gaga seems to literally become the screen – and, as the camera pulls back, what was once the screen is revealed to be the performer on the stage. This blurring between the screen itself and the performer on the stage suggests a kind of transgression of the screen. I’m thinking, for example, of Cronenberg’s film Videodrome, where the images on the screen actually become flesh (and the TV becomes flesh too!), or of Ringu/The Ring, where images invade reality. Both Videodromeand The Ring articulate an anxiety or terror concerning the viral image’s power to invade real (fleshy) life. Gaga seems to be doing something similar (or maybe I’ve just been thinking about these movies too much) when she positions her face as the screen itself, and then shows how her face moves from the screen to become a body on the stage. The crucial difference between films like Videodrome and what Gaga’s doing, however, lies in the fact that she views the transgression of the screen as something positive: art into life, art into popular culture, art pop.

Of course, here we should remind ourselves that since day one Gaga has said, over and over, that her spectacle is her reality, that her performative self is her essential (born this way) self. There isn’t a difference between what’s “real” or “born,” and what’s “staged” or “performed.”

Eddie: Another interesting difference is that, whereas in Videodrome and The Ring, the evil force wants to leave the television and enter or control our world, Gaga of course does the opposite – not pushing through the screen to approach us but drawing back, perhaps to invite us. Gaga’s all about finding and mobilizing the power of being watched; this performance might suggest to viewers the opportunity and fulfillment offered by entering the spectacle.

Meghan: Gaga sings: “If you want me you can watch me on your Videodrooooomme!”

Base (Black Bodysuit) Gaga

Eddie: I think of this as “Marry the Night” Gaga, or Gaga-as-night-as-Gaga (the suit even has little twinkling stars). It’s interesting to me that, while the performance is largely about performing performing, Gaga’s base layer isn’twhite (the natural choice for representing a space in which things are created); it’s black. This really emphasizes not just how everything she does is always a performance, even a performance of a performance of a performance, but how important emptiness or a threatening lack is to those endlessly-regressive nested performances. Her ability to perform doesn’t depend on a blankness, but on an emptiness, a loss of self. She isn’t a chameleon, but emptiness, an all-surface no-innards being – just like a Koons work.

When I watched this performance, I noted the little shiny balls everyone gets out for the Koons lyric, and I thought “I wonder if those are real Koons artworks or just imitation ones?” And then I got a big kick out of that question. If Koons’ works have no content, isn’t any counterfeit authentic? To the extent that Koons exists as an artist without intentionality, is anything that resembles his work in fact actually his work? Emptiness at the heart of a creative project explodes outwards, appropriating any imitations. But of course the imitations have also captured everything about the emptiness, since that emptiness is entirely present in content-less surface.

Gaga herself has long played with this kind of virality. Her dances are designed to be easily imitated and appropriated, and she regularly retweets fan versions of her dances and songs from YouTube. Her Google Chrome commercial collapsed her own performance of “Edge of Glory” into that of her fans, and “Applause” as a song itself falls into a description of what its listeners are doing in real-time.

Meghan: Of course I love the idea of emptiness or nothingness, represented here by Gaga dressed in black, as that upon which Gaga comes into being, and that allows her to manifest infinite versions of herself. Nothingness, after all, is without limits, and according to some it is a kind of pure potentiality. As she sings in “Marry the Night,” she’s a soldier to her own emptiness: she serves it, and it enables her to be.

Fame Era Gaga

Meghan: Ok, so when Gaga puts on her Fame-era-styled blue skirt and massively-shoulder-padded jacket, along with that angular bobbed platinum blonde wig with straight bangs, I was struck by how ICONIC that look already feels, even though it’s only been five or so years. And then I actually wrote down, Gaga’s performing Gaga!!!!!! – as though this is some sort of huge revelation! I mean, in a sense, Gaga’s always performing Gaga (keep in mind, once again, that being and performing go hand in hand for Gaga). She’s always performing Gaga, just as she’s always being Gaga; you can’t separate the two.

But here, what happens is slightly different: she’s performing a past version of herself – the version of herself that is, according to many, the most iconic, familiar, beloved, famous. It felt like she was dragging that past version of herself, performing a representation of her past self. I fell down the rabbit hole for a moment (or maybe my nerves are just on edge because school starts tomorrow, and the first day back always terrifies me!), and I saw Gaga in a kind of mise en abyme: Gaga mirroring Gaga mirroring Gaga mirroring Gaga …. ad infinitum.

Seeing ARTPOP-era Gaga bring Fame-era Gaga back to life was just really cool and also really uncanny. What was so familiar and beloved (Fame-era Gaga) was made strange (in a good way, in a Shklovskian stoney-stone way) once again so that we could actually SEEwhat we had forgotten, precisely because it had become so familiar to us. This is exactly what art’s supposed to do, by the way, according to Shklovsky:

Automatization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of war. [...] And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make the stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition. By ‘enstranging’ objects and complicating form, the devise of art makes perception long and ‘laborious.’

We overlook what is familiar and ordinary; Gage made us actually see herself again.

Eddie: To me, Fame-Gaga suggests a time before Gaga became concerned with flesh, with birth, even really before she became concerned with monsters, if we’re making a distinction between Fame and Fame Monster -Gagas. This was a time when Gaga was concerned with the mechanical production and reproduction of the self: flashing cameras, performances (understood in the more day-to-day get-up-on-stage-and-sing sense), costumes with cameras and screens, the tendency of pop stars to crash and burn, or even die. This was the age of plastic, not meat. And yet she was concerned with many themes that still occupy her today: most importantly, self-creation from a position of weakness or subordination. Creating yourself even though everyone watches you every minute, even though studio executives make you do stuff, even though you’re in an exploitative monetary or sexual or emotional relationship. It’s just that later, it became about creating yourself even though, after all, you didn’t get to pick your body or your sexuality, even though, to quote Tyler Durden, you’re just the same decaying organic matter as everything else.  

What’s so interesting about this performance, then, is the way it drags along something from the past, something in a sense forced upon Gaga. Of course she was herself back then too, but now, no matter how differently she may think or feel, she still has to accept that she was that then. But it also makes that past self available to this present one as raw material. I think that’s part of what Meghan and Shklovsky are getting at: it’s a lag or a disjunct of a confusion that allows things to appear to us. It’s only because we can’t grasp them perfectly that we can grasp them at all; otherwise they would be indistinguishable from our present experience or even ourselves. Gaga can only take herself up as an opportunity to create because she can no longer create that part of herself caught stickily in the past. Because some part of that past self resists her will, because it is sticky or heavy or irreducibly gross, she can create with it. This is, after all, why FameGaga used trash or pop to build herself, and why Born This Way or TelephoneGaga used flesh. Those materials offer a resistance that makes them capable of holding a form, even if their own participation in creating that form is the price they demand for our use of them.

Telephone Gaga

Eddie: So this performance does seem to sketch a little history of Gaga’s costumes or forms, and as people on Twitter have already asked – why not Born This WayGaga? Born This Way Gaga is obviously important, but I think this history is set up in such a way that makes “Telephone” Gaga the real tipping point or change-over. “Telephone” was a song about technology and communication sort of invading the body, or controlling it. And the video expanded on these themes by showing Gaga and Beyonce caught up bodily in the slurred stuttering of a connection – it also introduced the notion of Gaga as a poisonous force, escaping containment to invade not only the American heartland but even the meaty physical bodies of individual people.

Meghan: AND DOGS!!! Don’t ever forget the dead dog in the “Telephone” video.

Eddie: Thus, speaking broadly, “Telephone” Gaga represents the more performative and technological Fame Gaga as it first invades the essential and biological. It’s the beginning of when Gaga starts to use fleshier imagery and lyrics, and of when she begins to really reject maybe the only firm barrier left by postmodernism – that between performativity and essentialism. From then on her lyrics, videos, costumes, and interviews reject clear distinctions between choice and necessity, between the body and technology and clothing and meat (remember the telephone-hair-do, or, of course, the meat dress). The point of Born This Way is that it’s an ongoing struggle to become who you’ve always been, and the fact that you may have only recently learned something about yourself, or that you still don’tunderstand yourself doesn’t matter – you’ve always been destined to create yourself however you’ve been destined to want to.

Aphrodite Gaga

Eddie: Aphrodite is an appropriate figure to conclude Gaga’s account of self-transformation: Aphrodite is both the goddess of procreation and fertility (Gaga is not only creative, but also seeks to call up and empower creativity in others) and also came from nothing, fully-formed. Well, she emerged from the ocean after Zeus threw his father’s severed genitals in there, so really Aphrodite emerged from shredded flesh thrown into the tumultuous and unknown deeps. In this sense Gaga is a new being that has grown from the encounter of trauma with a vast emptiness, something which has struggled to create itself as a defense mechanism and, coincidentally, found itself in a vast space at just this moment. Again, pure, contentless creative power steps out of a void, claiming all creative power as its own preserve even as it increases the potential for the creative power of others.  

Meghan: And once again, we’ve arrived at “Gaga’s penis” (all roads lead there!). Of course I’m joking – I couldn’t help myself once you mentioned the fact that male genitals were the “clay” (so to speak) that formed Aphrodite.

It’s almost too obvious to say, but it’s still important to point out that her embodiment of Aphrodite is of a specific image of Botticelli’s Venus (Gaga’s hair most obviously signifies this, and the shell upon which Botticelli’s Venus stands has been transposed to the shells Gaga wears). As such, Gaga makes flesh the myth of Aphrodite as imagined in Botticelli’s artwork; she makes art into flesh – not necessarily myth into flesh.

The backdrop

Eddie: It’s . . . spikey, and it also includes the letters of “applause” jutting up at weird angles and differing heights. So Gaga and her dancers perform literally (i.e. they perform in the letters) in the midst of “applause.”

Meghan: I’m not quite sure what to make of this, but I think it’s interesting that she turns into letters – both in the stage’s props, and in her hand gestures that spell out “applause” – that which is a non-verbal form of communication (applause). Why would she do this? What’s the point of making a non-verbal form of communication verbal?

Eddie: Well, it reminds me of transforming back and forth between flesh and image, or performance and reality.

Dancers

Eddie: Obviously the dancers play a particularly important role in this performance. They’re part of it, of course, but they also play an odd half-role in facilitating it. They dress and undress Gaga, and they circle around her to hide her during the final transformation. Of course Gaga’s dancers are often required to play such a role, but the fact that changing costumes isn’t incidental to but constitutive of this particular performance makes their function more ambiguous. Perhaps their black costumes are supposed to suggest that they’re made of a substance similar to that of Base Gaga – some even have skull caps. Thus the emptiness that makes up Gaga can be just as present in her “subordinates,” and Gaga herself is actively built by the actions of this emptiness.

OK – what did we miss that you want to talk about? What do you think about the recorded (we think they were recorded) "boos" once the music begins? What’s up with the background? Why is it so spikey? Why do you think Gaga chose Fame and Telephone appearances to go with her new ARTPOP ones? Or do you think those costumes mean something entirely different? Let’s make a discussion, dear readers!

Author Bios:

You can read more by Eddie and Meghan here, where they mainly write about nothing and really terrible movies in which images invade reality.

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Gaga Apotheosis

By Edmund McCaffray

One of the first things that stood out to me from the “Applause” video was the “freak-out” that comes at the song’s climax. The camera shakes, as though either it or perhaps the world can’t contain Lady Gaga in those moments. And for good reason: Lady Gaga herself explodes through a stuttering rush of fast-cuts, appearing in several forms, triumphant and ecstatic.

It isn’t, by any means, the most unusual thing for a music video to do, but Gaga’s videos don’t always include this freak-out. In fact, I associate it specifically with “Marry the Night” because a similar freak-out takes place there. Once again it comes, naturally, at the musical climax of the song, and fast-cut-splices together a dizzying array of scenes drawn from across the whole (fourteen minute!) video.

Going back and watching the “Marry the Night” video (as part of the kind of gut-associative process that I like to let guide, if possible, the early stages of working on one of these essays), it was only now that the whole long ragged narrative of that video kind of fell into place for me. Lady Gaga gets rejected from high art, flips out, tries to kill herself, and then reconstructs her experience of the event as an act of creative will and healing. She converts the trauma of the suicide attempt into a fit of self-transformation – dying her hair, blowing up some cars, falling down a flight of stairs with an impractically-large keyboard, and joining a more pop-style dance troupe (note that she’s wearing her bedazzled denim and newly-bleached hair).  

OK, so fine. That’s what that video from like a million years ago was about. Except that today I realized that that narrative actually has a lot to do with “Applause.” The most obvious direct statement of this is the lyric: “art’s in pop culture in me” – Lady Gaga is a refugee or an outcast from the world of high art who now resides in the world of pop culture, and so she brings some of that art with her in the course of her personal transmission between these two realms.

But there’s also the beginning of the song, when Gaga sings “if only fame had an IV, baby could I bear, being away from you, I found a vein put it in here.” This connects “Applause” not just metaphorically, but particularly to “Marry the Night”: Gaga appears at the very beginning of “Marry the Night” with an IV in her arm, as part of her medical treatment for the suicide attempt. What’s in there? Fame or some other vital fluid?

Gaga tells her nurse in that video that she’s “gonna be a star . . . because I have nothing left to lose.” In being ejected from her dance troupe, or film, or whatever high art project is associated with her director and those ballet scenes, Gaga has lost everything. She’s been personally or spiritually emptied by that loss in just the same way that, if she cut herself with shards of that mirror she’s destroys during her raging breakdown, she’d been emptied of blood. And this is especially drastic for Gaga since, as she tells us, she’s “a soldier to my own emptiness” – emptiness drives and commands her. This girl’s been bled dry by the gaping hole left in her by the removal of art? We need a fame infusion, stat.

So “Marry the Night” is the story of, among other things, an emptying both physical and spiritual, caused by being rejected by art. The song tells us how that rejection drove Gaga’s radical commitment – marriage – to her own emptiness (signified by night, or the absence of light), which drives her to make the immensely difficult, even self-transforming, transition from living on art or blood to living on pop. Or, more accurately, to living on fame.

“Applause” picks this narrative right up, telling us that now Gaga is a new creature fueled by fame, by applause. She found a vein, put it in there. She loves for it. Give her what she loves – she’ll turn the lights out. Of course the double entendre is there – “Give me that thing that I love, I’ll turn the lights out . . . make ‘em touch” – but there’s also an emphasis on blackness, the dark, the night as the appropriate setting for Gaga’s regular, life-sustaining, fame injections.

So I want to suggest that the “Applause” video shows the peculiar co-spatiality of pop or fame (represented as applause) and Gaga’s night or emptiness, and from there explore Gaga’s intimate – indeed, marital – relationship to pop-fame-applause-night-emptiness.

Roland Betancourt has already argued that, as a phenomenological definition of pop, “the experience of the fan unfolds primarily in movement and circulation through mobile media. It is the method of the navigator: the incessant movement through space and time, consuming and representing images, clips, and laconic texts as one goes about.” When I first read this (great) definition, I was struck by how optimistically Roland could describe what Heidegger also noticed, but found deeply ominous. One of Heidegger’s central critiques of “public-ness” was that such a way of being reduced seeing and investigating and experiencing to a frantic curiosity that flitted restlessly from one thing to another, never in order to understand those things, but actually as a way of hiding the world, everything in it, and even ultimately the self. “In not tarrying, curiosity is concerned with the constant possibility of distraction . . . curiosity is everywhere and nowhere” (217).

At the end of this essay, I’ll attempt to reconcile these two opposed readings of the same phenomenon – for now I want to claim that both suggest a kind of emptiness-through-motion exists in (or as) pop, the experience of the fan, public-ness, curiosity, etc. For Betancourt, this is an individual navigation conducted within and across established “systems” of images, texts, and cultural reproduction in such a free and idiosyncratic way as to allow a new space for creation to appear; for Heidegger a movement that, by its speed and relentless continuance, actually hidesfrom every real thing.

Many of Gaga’s projects, too, have suggestedthat certain kinds of movement can create a special kind of emptiness, an emptiness that is a potential for transformation and creation. “Marry the Night” suggests that the thrashings of trauma can create a blank canvas for re-creation, or that one’s own emptiness drags one relentlessly through transformation and self-reinvention. And the connection between night or darkness and emptiness, made by a Gaga who commits herself (whether as wife or soldier) to both in “Marry the Night,” certainly continues such a notion. Thus movement creates an emptiness (pop), to which Gaga has dedicated her life, for which she has become a vessel, within which something (usually the self) can be (re)-created.

So how does this process appear in the “Applause” video, and what does the video reveal about the process?

First of all, there are a number of ways in which Gaga represents her commitment – in all its difficulty, pain, and glory – to pop-emptiness in the “Applause” video. She appears as Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe, wearing a collar of bleached bones (or are they feathers?) and a long white (wedding?) dress, in a black, thorny bird cage. This obviously functions under the current paradigm in a number of ways. The cage is black, connoting the metaphorical night of pop-emptiness to which Gaga is married and perhaps also the stabbing prison of fame that ultimately destroyed Marilyn Monroe. Gaga and Monroe are both held up in the cage for all to see, not unlike the birds normally kept in such cages. Pop-emptiness and fame are thus figured as a kind of painful burden to which Gaga has lovingly committed herself. Marilyn Monroe is quoted as another who dared to walk a similar path, and the vehicle of that quote, Warhol’s image, is proof of Gaga’s statement “art’s in pop culture in me.”

Next is Gaga’s Pierrot/mime figure (also identified and analyzedby Roland Betancourt), which here appears ensnared in a billowy white (wedding?) dress-pillow-thing. Again, black and white are juxtaposed in a representation of Gaga’s marital (or martial?) commitment to fame through performance. Again she embodies the collision of high and low/pop art.

There is also Gaga in black underwear on a white mattress, dancing and writhing. Is she performing, clad in pop-emptiness upon a blank stage? Or is she in her wedding bed, consummating her marriage to the absence that is night, represented by the black underwear?

There’s also her performance as a rabbit in a magician’s top hat (defiantly catching the thrown knives of critics in her teeth). The hat is black, thus playing the role of pop-emptiness, and though Gaga herself does not wear white here, that which she performs – the magician’s rabbit – is conventionally white. In this figuration, Gaga threatens to disappear and re-appear like the rabbit at the behest of her performance.

There is also the stage on which the video in general appears: this stage which oscillates between fashion-show runway and wedding-chapel aisle, depending on whether Gaga struts in fake wings like a Victoria’s Secret model, vogues as if in high fashion, or somberly marches to her dreadful groom as Persephone.

The ultimate visual figuration of this principle, however, is the hands suit (hand-kini?). In this garment, applause as a representative of fame is embodied, and in fact this applause, this fame, makes it possible for Gaga to appear – she couldn’t release a music video in which she exposed her breasts, now could she? And if she weren’t famous, she wouldn’t be making a big-budget wide-release video! Of course the hands suit is black, not only quoting the famous Janet Jackson image, but also suggesting a quite intimate touch from her betrothed, the night of emptiness.

Note: It appears that Gaga's own shadow cups her breasts; hence, she wears her own shadow.
(see below for further analysis)

It is here, however, that the video and song begin to suggest the identity of this betrothed. Applause comes from fans, after all, and the lyrics of the song could be taken as the orders to Gaga’s fans that, when carried out, construct the hands suit and allow Gaga to appear: “put your hands up, make them touch” – make them touch what?       

If this is true, and the lyrics of the song combine with Gaga’s garment to posit the experience and activity of fandom itself as Gaga’s betrothed, the night of emptiness, we’ve arrived back at Betancourt and Heidegger’s shared concept of pop as emptiness created by movement, and Betancourt and Gaga’s shared concept of pop as an emptiness within which something new can be created, or something old remade. The activity of Gaga’s fans creates an empty space within which Gaga herself is generated as an embodiment of their creativity and self-transformation, and in return this embodiment dedicates herself as both soldier and lover of her creator – fandom.

This makes perfect sense with Gaga’s appearance as Aphrodite in the “Applause” video. Her hair and clamshell pasties suggest Venus Anadyomene, or Venus/Aphrodite “rising from the sea.” This image in classical mythology depicted the appearance of the goddess of beauty and fertility, fully-formed, from the mysterious, protean, and purifying ocean. Gaga, in her art and fashion, works to create beauty, and is re-made anew in fame and the empty space of pop generated by fan movement.  

But, as always with Gaga, this succession of images invoking pop, art, and everything in between is not simply deployed as a symbolic language with which to tell the allegory of her own life, creative process, and relationship to fame and fandom. The entire system here threatens to shift, erupt, invert itself.

As Betancourt has also shown(yea, I know, guy’s on fire), Gaga, keeping to the tradition of performing Pierrot, takes special care to show that even the white on which her performance appears is performed. Thus in the above sequence of white-and-black patterns, the depiction is never that of a virginal Gaga/Marilyn captured and exploited by the black of fame and pop-emptiness. Gaga, as a bride clad in white, always asserts her own creativity and independence within the constraint of cages, underwear, top hats, and applause. Though contained in these empty expanses created by the movement of fans, she defiantly scrubs herself clean or actively blanks her own self to serve as a better medium, a better embodiment of that which has called her up into being.

These performances, of course, always call up a new and particular field of responsive movements within the great pop meta-system, and thus her black cage and white wedding dress mutually construct one another so equally and so primordially that it becomes impossible to establish any primacy at all. Hence the alternations and shifts in her series of white-black costume-tableaux in the video: she appears in a white dress inside a black cage, in a black suit inside a billowy white cape-pillow, as a white “rabbit” in a black hat, in black underwear on a white mattress, in a black suit wearing white wings, in her own pale skin within the clasping black of the hands suit. Probably nothing demonstrates this principle better than when Gaga puts on her hands suit, right in the middle of the video. Look closely (1:27) – the flashing lights of implied cameras make it appear as though a person, dressed in black and faceless, stands behind Gaga with his or her hands over her breasts. Her pelvic thrusts only accentuate the effect. For many viewings, I was convinced that there was an actual person there, and that only later were the hands a piece of clothing. But it is Gaga’s shadow.

This reveals, of course, that the night to which Gaga betroths herself, the emptiness that fills her, the coursing writhing of fandom that is the hypostasis of Gaga, is Gaga herself.

So the stutter of fast-cuts between various black-and-white scenes, just like the here-and-gone shadow thrown out by flashing strobes, reveals that Gaga dresses herself in the product of a performance to which she is beholden and which she also calls forth as a condition of her self-creation. But all this happens at once, creating not the plodding linear narrative I have outlined here, but the radical flash of total self-construction, of experience exploding outwards beyond itself, only to find yet more of itself in a form so other it threatens to deny recognition.

We circled back to exploding, ecstasy, and the sudden exceeding of both structure and self represented in the climaxes of both “Marry the Night” and “Applause,” with which I began this essay. Gaga’s emptiness has driven her, its loyal servant, fully outside herself, but there beyond the borders of Stefani Germanotta is only another emptiness, this one the product of public fan movement. And this emptiness in turn directs Gaga’s movements, ensnares her, clothes her, sets her forth. But what does this reveal? That the emptiness outside is the emptiness within, and that either both are Gaga, or neither are. Like curiosity, she is everywhere and nowhere; as pure image without content, one second she’s a Koons – then suddenly the Koons is she.

Perhaps this is the meaning of Gaga’s Persephone persona in “Applause”: the somber bride marching in mourning through a shimmering purple passage between the world of the living and the world of the dead (just as Gaga walked from the world of art to the world of pop). Persephone was venerated in the most important of the ancient mystery cults. Initiation ceremonies for this cult – dedicated to Persephone and her mother Demeter (goddess not only of fertility but also of marriage and the cycle of life and death) – reproduced the three-part story of Persephone. First, she was abducted by Hades, a figure not unlike the night of pop-emptiness (being associated not only with death and darkness but with wealth as well), and carried off to the underworld. Next, her mother searched for her, and blighted the crops of men until Persephone was released and finally rejoined her mother in the third stage. But Persephone had eaten some of the food of the dead, and thus was required to spend a part of each year underground, with her husband. While she existed straddling life and death, the initiates of the cult were promised rewards in a life to come.

Gaga is the chalk outline, white on black or maybe black on white, of a girl found dead in New York City. A girl who never made it. But the trauma of that girl’s self-destruction has created a cascade of images exploding outwards, from which those who peruse, repost, imitate, and adapt generate a new, higher form of that girl and her ruined, lost life. This trauma and the human life at the core of it, the pain and fear that continue to inhabit the cascade, has ennobled the experience of pop, and threatens to make it possible to create something valuable out of that frantic movement. Like Persephone – or, hell, why not at this point: like Jesus – she transforms the banal and worldly into a tool of transcendence, unlocking within it a route to a world of freedom and meaning, renewal and self-transformation.

To those who partake of her body image?

Author Bio:

Eddie McCaffray is a PhD student studying medieval history at Arizona State University. In addition to history, he likes philosophy, literature, and the Russian language.

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